Mutilate Compendium - 3.3.3 And Beyond

NOTE: The links are currently broken, sorry for the mess of iurls and anchors. The admins are working on re-integrating those functions into the forum, and until that time this guide will look messy! Thanks for not hating me =P

Standard Raid Mutilate:51/18/2 (Includes Glyphs)
This is the standard and the only currently viable Assassination build.
Some suggest 51/13/7 is viable or even optimal in some cases. It's not. The reasoning behind which is very complex and math heavy. The short answer is: The conclusions gained by many respected members of the rogue theorycrafting community support the statement that 51/18/2 is the only viable spec. It sims lower in both spreadsheets. The reasoning is that increasing rupture uptime decreases envenom uptime. The loss of dps from the decrease in envenom uptime outweighs the gains of rupturing.

These are the three talents you can choose to spend 2 total points between. if you are expertise capped, or very close, Fleet Footed should be your general choice for pretty much everything (run speed is invaluable for non-tank'n'spank fights), if you aren't Quick Recovery is usable, however, expertise is highly worth capping, but we'll discuss that later.Blood Spatter is for if (somehow) rupture is in your optimal rotation (which it shouldn't ever be), or if no other bleeds are available and you're using Garrote to provide the bleed for Hunger for Blood. Even then, blood spatter is likely behind the other two on any fight short of a completely stand still tank n' spank.

Important Talents and Abilities:
(Acronyms used later in this guide are in parentheses before the ability's link)

(TotT) - Tricks of the Trade - Donates all your threat to the target of your choosing as well as increasing their damage by 15% for 6 seconds.

(Env) - Envenom - Our primary finisher. Ignores armor, and does damage based on how many stacks of Deadly Poison our target has. Generally consumes a dose of Deadly Poison for every combo point, unless you have...

(MP) - Master Poisoner - This wonderfully multi-faceted talent provides us with both a 3% raidwide crit increase on poisoned targets and the ability to Envenom without consuming Deadly Poison.

(HfB) - Hunger for Blood - This is our 51 point beast in assassination. In it's hay-day, when glyphed, HfB Provided a whopping 18% flat damage boost to every ounce of damage you put out. It currently only gives 8%.

(CttC) - Cut to the Chase - Our 46 point selection in the Assassination tree allows us to refresh the duration of SnD to it's full 5 point maximum. Very handy, and rather important to DPSing as mutilate.

(OK) - Overkill - This talent gives us a 30% increase in energy regeneration for 20 seconds after leaving stealth.

(CB) - Cold Blood - Our 21 point Assassination tree choice. Provides you with a free critical on next special attacks. This ability isn't on the GCD, so you can pop it safely whenever you're ready to use it.

(IP) - Instant Poison IX - The first of our 2 primary DPS poisons. Instant poison is a chance on hit (based on PPM, discussed later) to do nature damage based on your attack power

(DP) - Deadly Poison IX - The second of the primary DPS poisons. Deadly applies a DOT to your target that deals damage based on attack power. When DP reaches a 5 stack, all applications after that will cause the poison in your other hand to proc.

Weapon choices:

When raiding as Mutilate, there is virtually no situation where you'll want to run 2 slow weapons. You'll always want at least one of your daggers to be 1.5 speed or faster. Having two fast weapons is completely usable, and in some cases, optimal. When choosing which weapon goes in which hand, always put the higher dps dagger in your main hand. Your offhand is subject to a 50% damage penalty (25% with 5/5 Dual Wield Specialization talented), and thus having more dps in your mainhand will always increase your overall damage done.

Have two slow weapons and want to raid? Click here to find a suitable fast dagger!

Poison choices:

You will always want to run with Instant Poison IX on your slower weapon and Deadly Poison IX on your faster weapon because Deadly Poison's proc is a chance on hit proc rather than PPM (Procs Per Minute). All instant strikes (Combo builders and finishers) proc mainhand poisons, and a full stack of Deadly Poison also procs your other hand's poison when refreshing it's stack. With equal speed weapons, Deadly Poison on the higher DPS weapon in your main hand is a slight DPS increase.
An important note: Your Mutilate poison requirements can be fulfilled by other rogues and hunters Serpent Sting, which is why you do not need to wait for a Deadly Poison application before opening with or using another mutilate.

"Rotation":

There isn't really a set rotation for mutilate, however, it's very straightforward, and is what some would call a "spamfest" after getting your important buffs running. Using a tracking addon to manage cooldowns for when to pool energy will help make the rotation more dynamic as well as increasing your dps.

Before the Pull and Opening on a boss:
Always begin every fight in stealth to ensure you get Overkill for the first 20 seconds of the fight, and always use Mutilate as your opener, unless no other bleeds are available for Hunger for Blood. Garrote will do equivalent damage/energy, but requires you to stay stealthed all the way to your target and for you to get behind your target, wasting valuable auto-attack and poison application time. Garrote also only awards you with 1 combo point, whereas mutilate rewards 2-3.

Generally in a 25 man raid you can rely on dps warriors or feral druids on keeping the bleeds up for Hunger for Blood, if you however don't have this luxury you can open on the boss with a Garrote or if you're unlucky or a boss pulls you out of stealth go for a really quick, low combo point rupture, just make sure you start combat from stealth, regardless of if you get pulled out when the boss engages. Overkill is highly worth being stealthed for.

Rotation:
Using Envenom as your only finisher is optimal in nearly all gear sets.
Cut to the Chase refreshes Slice and Dice with Eviscerate or Envenom, so after the initial application of Slice and Dice, you'll only be using Envenom to refresh it's duration.
All Envenoms (with certain exceptions) are used with 4+ combo points.

If Hunger for Blood is dropping, refresh it as late as possible without letting it drop.
If at any time Slice and Dice is falling, use an Envenom to keep it up, regardless of combo points.
When envenoming, Pool your energy and use it at the last possible moment (60-80 energy). This allows for you to get more mutilates in during Envenom's buff duration, and gives you an overall higher uptime on Envenom's buff. Don't envenom with an envenom buff up unless you're going to cap on energy real soon. This is called "clipping" and is essentially wasting part of the envenom buff. At high levels of haste (ICC25 hard mode and beyond), you may find it impossible to pool energy and not clip envenoms. In this case, only pool when trinkets are about to proc, or you know something big like heroism or a bite on BQL is coming very soon.

Important note: All special attacks including Finishers can be dodged if you are not expertise capped, this can seriously mess up rotations, and destroy your white hits for proccing poisons. If you're not capped on expertise, give yourself at least 2 global cooldown's worth of time to refresh Slice and Dice.

Expertise currently holds an extremely high value, and should be capped or very nearly capped at all times.

Cooldown usage:
Unlike Combat, Assassination has relatively few cooldowns. Vanish, Cold Blood, and Tricks of the Trade are all we have to work with. Vanish?!? Yes, vanish. Vanishing puts you back into stealth, rebuffing you with Overkill, netting you a 3min cooldown worth 20s of enhanced energy regen. Cold Blood should be used with large Envenoms, preferably 5 points, but don't wait too long if the fight's expected to last more than 3min. Tricks of the Trade can be used on cooldown to either ensure a tank is able to hold threat on fights where damage scaling is an issue (Hodir, Twin Valks, etc..), or as a DPS cooldown for a friend (preferably the highest dps in range). Generally speaking, so long as your TotT target is doing similar damage to you, using it is worth the energy so long as you don't mess up your rotation. After obtaining 2 pieces of tier 10, you'll definitely want to use TotT on cooldown to net yourself a free 15 energy (and net the raid quite a bit of dps) every 30s.

Vanish Macro:
The following macro, if mashed, will use vanish and immediately begin auto-attacking your current target, losing only minimal auto-attacks and gaining Overkill.

Raid bosses have a chance to dodge your attacks even when you stand behind them. With expertise, you can negate this.

Bosses have around a 6.50% chance to dodge your attacks, this goes for all main attacks (mutilate, etc) all finishers and white damage.

Each point of expertise gives you a 0.25% reduction on being dodged.

you will need 214 expertise rating from gear, or 26 expertise points.
Simply put, if you don't read 26/26 expertise in your character tab, you aren't capped, and should consider gemming expertise to fix this.

Yellow attacks and white auto-attacks do not work the same when it comes to the attack table. Yellow attacks use a so called two-roll system and white auto attacks however use a one-roll system. Simply put: the crit cap for specials is not affected by avoidances like dodge, parry, miss, glancing blows, etc Therefore:

the crit cap for specials is 104.8% at its highest.

Since white auto-attacks are single roll, the crit cap for them would be affected by avoidances. Therefore, you could calculate the crit cap by subtracting your combined avoidance chance (miss + dodge + parry + glance + block) from 104.8%. As long as you are behind the mob, parry and block are 0%. Glance is always 24%. Therefore:

the crit cap on white attacks is 80.08% at its highest.

More in-depth information about the attack table can be found at WoWWiki's Attack Table page.
More information on how to calculate your own crit cap can be found here.

Professions:
Here's a simple layout of EP values, and in certain cases, explanation of enhanced value from particular professions.

Engineering:
68 average-case haste from Hyperspeed Accelerators instead of Enchant Gloves - Crusher~85.2EP gain
*Based on this post, Bombs on cooldown can be estimated to add up to 30EP if used on cooldown. Nitro Boosts provide a decent boot enchant with vastly increased movement speed on a 3min cooldown, useful for heavy movement fights. If the value of haste gets pushed > 2EP, the value of this profession is pushed even higher. This profession is highly dependent on using bombs/gloves on cooldown when opportune.Jewelcrafting:
+84 AP from 3 Bright Dragon's Eyes replacing standard Bright Cardinal Rubies84EP gain
*If/when haste or another stat breaks an EP of 2.0, the value of this profession increases.Tailoring:
128 average-case AP from Swordguard Embroidery vs 22agi/23haste.~83EP gain
*If/when haste breaks an EP of 2.0, the value of this profession *decreases* as the value of Enchant Cloak - Greater Speed increases. However, due to the 45s internal cooldown, this proc lines up well with trinkets which may or may not slightly increase this profession's value.Blacksmithing:
+80 AP from 2 extra sockets created by: Socket Bracer and Socket Gloves80EP gain
*Like JC, if/when haste or another stat breaks an EP of 2.0, the value of this profession increases.Alchemy:
+80 AP on a Flask of Endless Rage from Mixology.80EP gain
*Double flask duration, decent choice for the thrifty rogue.Leatherworking:
+80 AP on Fur Lining - Attack Power80EP gainInscription:
+80 AP on Master's Inscription of the Axe80EP gainEnchanting:
2x +40 AP Enchant Ring - Assault80EP gainSkinning:Master of Anatomy - Passive 40 crit rating.~68.8EP gain
*Due to crit capping, not very practical for DPS increase, especially in higher-end gear.Herbalism:Lifeblood - 3600HP recovered of 5s.0EP gain
*Slight survival gain, not practical.Mining:Toughness - Passive 60stam bonus.0EP gain
*Slight survival gain, not practical.

A few notes: A spreadsheets]spreadsheet is *highly* recommended for determining your optimal gem layout. These gemming choices could completely change based on your own personal gear! This is just a general guideline to the average gemming a mut rogue will encounter. I'm going to list 2 options, and you should *always* consult a spreadsheet about gemming! What's not here: Hit gems. Hit gems are useful if you're having issues with the crit cap or are under the poison hit-cap. At the crit cap, white hit's EP should jump higher than haste's, and depending on if it jumps higher than AP, it may be worth it to look into Hit or AP/Hit gems. Expertise gems are included in both, due to the value of capping expertise.

Metagem:
ANY helm with a meta socket (literally) is better than not having one.

Many will find that their gear puts them somewhere between option one and two. Mixing pure haste gems and pure AP gems is entirely possible, and for gearsets with haste's EP floating almost exactly at 2.0, you'll see that what's optimal for your gear is a balance of AP vs haste gemming. My current mutilate gear (as of writing this) has ~2/3 slots filled with option 2 and ~1/3 filled with option 1 to maximize DPS.

The bottom line is: You have to spend some time with the spreadsheets]spreadsheets to really figure out what gems are optimal. I usually fill every red socket with 40AP, and every yellow socket with 20ap/10haste. I then plug in the recommended gems one at a time starting from my helm all the way down to my weapons. If I don't see an estimated DPS increase, I revert the gem back to it's previous and skip it. After repeating this a few times, you'll eventually come out with what should be your optimal gems - or very close to what should be your optimal gems. Trial and error is king, and paying attention to your estimated DPS as you change gems is the only sure-fire way of knowing you're doing it right.

Glyphs:

This is fairly simple, there are two mandatory glyphs for Mutilate raiding.Glyph of Hunger for BloodGlyph of Mutilate
The third can be a few choices, but most will find the highest DPS out of Glyph of Tricks of the Trade, especially if you have 2 pieces of Tier 10, and especially if you've got anyone doing somewhere close to the same amount of damage as you.

As you may have noticed there is no Spreadsheet Thread. This is because the Spreadsheet is hosted on ElitistJerks and as such you should be going there for advice and support. It's akin to Adobe providing support for Windows. This thread will be unstickied and allowed to go to the Digital Graveyard.

I'm not going to field any spreadsheet questions here. The official site for the spreadsheets is ElitistJerks, and any help needed beyond the wowhead guide can be found by reading the official EJ thread (yes, it's gigantic), or posting questions there.

The Assassination FAQ has a tiny tidbit of help for those looking to add their own gear, but beyond that, the amount of help I'm willing to offer for something I didn't make is limited. That being said, go get the spreadsheet. It's invaluable for determining optimal gearing and gemming for your current gear sets. Everyone's outcomes will be different, and trying to guess or get a reliable answer as to what's right will be tough without first running through the sheets.

Buffs Beneficial to the Rogue:
Lets get a nice overview of what others can buff us with in a raid setting.
Note that if two or more abilities provide the same buff they do not stack.
I'm skipping Hunter Pet buffs and debuffs for this and the next part.

Also note that the spellpower percantage to crit and damage do infact buff the rogues poison damage,
Envenom however does not take the benefit from the spellcrit buff and debuff.

Assassination FAQ!

This is totally filler. For later.

Assassination FAQ!
Q: How much DPS should I be doing in X gear?
A: Check the spreadsheet. If the spreadsheet doesn't have your gear, add it. Keep in mind that it only simulates unhindered, perfectly played tank'n'spank situations. If you have a WWS/WoL/WMO parse, multiply your spreadsheet dps and your active time percentage to get a rough estimate of how much you should be doing.

Q: Add gear to the spreadsheet?!? How?
A:

- unhide the gear sheet (Format > sheet > unhide > gear)
- copy the whole line of an existing item in the correct gear area (helms go with other helms) by right clicking the line number before the first cell and selecting copy
- insert the copied line in the middle of the block (don't copy it at the beginning or the end of the particular section) by right clicking the space between two line numbers on the left and selecting insert copied cells.
- modify only the name, stats, sockets, speed/dps for weapons, socket bonuses (abbreviated as s.agi for agility, etc...) and drop zone, DONT TOUCH ANY FORMULAS

Q: Hows this new amazing hybrid Assassination spec hold up dpswise?
A: Spreadsheet it if you're daring. Otherwise, it's safe to assume that the standard spec in the first post is optimal.

Q: How good are the proc based weapons?
A: The ones off of Onyxia are terrible for PvE. The Heartpierce out of ICC 25 fluctuates based on buffs/nerfs, but at current is slightly worse than TotGC 258 Daggers and ICC 264 Daggers The heroic heartpierce is better than equivalent 277 daggers, but still sub-par compared to H-LK's amazing dagger (of course).

Q: Where can I find a good best in slot list for mutilate? *updated 4/24*
A: This changes every patch and tweak, and as new gear gets tested and found. Currently, mavanas on the EJ forums keeps a BiS list here, but that's subject to change, and based off of his own spreadsheet, not both of them. Hint: Every item says heroic and is from ICC.

Q: How does envenom work when i have x combo points and y doses of deadly on my target?
A: Envenom has 2 parts, the static damage and the AP enhanced damage. The static damage is completely based on how many stacks of DP your target has, whereas the AP enhanced damage is based only on how many combo points you have.

Re: Mutilate Compendium - 3.3 And Beyond

Thanks for the guide.

My rogue is just a work in progress so my personal scale factors aren't particularly relevant but taking the rough scale factors from the thread you linked at EJ, the gap between your suggested 23 haste on cloak and the unmentioned 22 agility is very small.

I only mention it since this kind of guide is going to be used by people like me more than those who are nearing BiS already and personally, the agility works out better for me at the moment. It might be worth inclusion as an option at least.

Re: Mutilate Compendium - 3.3 And Beyond

While you said average gemming, the 20 haste gem is quite viable and even better then stark (20haste/10ap) with certain gear sets. 51/13/7 isn't very far behind 51/18/2 and it probably better for lower gear levels i.e. if you use rupture. If you are using rupture you should spec into blood spatter and get the glyph of rupture as your third glyph.

There are many addons that do similar things to the ones you listed so it is a matter of preference but overall it is a solid guide.

Re: Mutilate Compendium - 3.3 And Beyond

Originally Posted by Cainick

While you said average gemming, the 20 haste gem is quite viable and even better then stark (20haste/10ap) with certain gear sets. 51/13/7 isn't very far behind 51/18/2 and it probably better for lower gear levels i.e. if you use rupture. If you are using rupture you should spec into blood spatter and get the glyph of rupture as your third glyph.

There are many addons that do similar things to the ones you listed so it is a matter of preference but overall it is a solid guide.

Yeah, I didn't want to go too heavy into rupture specs. With the added LFG tool, getting geared enough to drop rupture is a rather easy task, and a bleed based spec in heroics where mobs and bosses die in 45s doesn't really go over well.

The gem thing is definitely something I'm working on covering. I'm actually writing an expanded gem section to cover the whole situation when the EP of haste breaks 2.0 and how hit gemming fixes crit capping etc.

And there are *tons* of tracking addons/methods, but back in the old compendium, we had a long discussion about em and positif ended up grabbing the 4 that were really heavily preferred by our posters at that time =D.

Re: Mutilate Compendium - 3.3 And Beyond

Originally Posted by Jubite

When did AP become better than agil, or have I just missed something?
Either way great post~ keep it updated in the patches to come :P

Like the post above me said, part of it is crit capping at higher levels. AP stays ahead almost all the time, though, due to the buffs poisons have recieved (mostly the DP@5stacks procs IP buff). Poisons benefit really heavily from AP, and getting 2x the AP from a gem just comes out ahead now.

Other than that, its quite a good guide - at least should reduce the number of handholding threads...

To be more specific, improved shadow bolt (in first post as a buff in the same category as moonkin aura and elemental oath) is actually a debuff on the target, mutually exclusive with a fire mage's scorch.

Re: Mutilate Compendium - 3.3 And Beyond

You might want to add in that at t9 gear levels and above, Mongoose over-rides Berserking as the weapon enchant of choice. Or has that changed in the very recent past? I check EJ fairly often and haven't seen anything saying otherwise.

If you want to make raiding content harder, turn off DBM. Voila! Your encounters will be much more challenging without bleeps and someone telling you to "run away, little girl."

Re: Mutilate Compendium - 3.3 And Beyond

With the PPM nerf that just hit this last couple days, Im fairly certain Mongoose now is less then berserking, it is for me atleast, its a 20 dps loss for me to be using mongoose over berserking, before it was 15 dps increase for me as per spreadsheet.

And yes angstrom, the Improved shadowbolt is actually a crit debuff on the target, that is the equivilent to a frost mage, or fire mage.

Re: Mutilate Compendium - 3.3 And Beyond

Originally Posted by Nartalath

You might want to add in that at t9 gear levels and above, Mongoose over-rides Berserking as the weapon enchant of choice. Or has that changed in the very recent past? I check EJ fairly often and haven't seen anything saying otherwise.

With the fun crit-capping issues we get to deal with, things with an agi proc can be very finicky. Combine that with the PPM changes and we're going to have to relegate mongoose to our warglaives in the closet and leave it there.

Re: Mutilate Compendium - 3.3 And Beyond

as for gems, haste gems will go past ap in ep weight and you should go for pure haste in yellow and ap/haste in red.

Needs to use a spreadsheet for clarification ofc, and be sure you got the same buffs as you got in your spreadsheet.

Overall nice guide. Lacks profession advice >.>

Yeah, as i said earlier, I have a better gems section in the works, and good Idea on that profession category, i'll work on that too =D

The ap/haste and pure haste thing isn't always true, however. generally speaking, right as haste approaches and beats AP, the second you gem a single haste gem, AP will jump back up. OFC as your gear gets better, eventually you'll have replaced all your gems with haste variants, but right now, most people will see a mix of the two on a spreadsheet.

Re: Mutilate Compendium - 3.3 And Beyond

I'm having issues with the envenom debuff actually running OUT before I even have energy enough to cast a new envenom?
My stats are 1.09/140 speed, 4524 AP, 343 HR, 44,85% Crit, 21/21 exp.

Any thoughts?

I usually open with garrote, pop SnD, pop HfB and starts mutilating. I cast the first envenom when I have 4 or 5 combopoints. Then I see there the timer on debuff duration, but it's most liely, it gets to run out before I have a chance (enough energy) to cast another envenom at 4 or 5 combopoints. I am specced, gemmed and geared for this build (2x t10 pieces, heruml war token and so on).

Re: Mutilate Compendium - 3.3 And Beyond

You won't see anywhere near 100% uptime. If you've got the energy for an envenom right at the end of the envenom buff, more power to you, but if you're sitting at 3cp, or are bone dry out of energy, it's best to just hold off, pool back up to 60-80 energy and then start envenoming while clipping with .5s left on the buff or so until you can't keep it up and have to pool again =D